ADORNO & JAZZ: REFERENCES (1)

[Ralph Dumain <rdumain@xxxxxxx>]

For a couple of years I've been helping a friend who just completed his
dissertation on Hegel and black music.  It is noteworthy that he received
no help at all from within academia, least of all from his own department,
where all the dweebs concerned could do was refer him to Adorno.  So I
helped him collect as many sources as I could, as well as discussing the
develpomenet of his ideas, as I've assisted others stifled by academia.  I
also provided him with references and abstracts of various material,
including articles on Adorno.  I'm trying to dig up this material now, as
promised earlier.  Here's my first installment.

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(1)  Hersch, Charles.  "Let Freedom Ring!": Free Jazz and African-American
Politics", CULTURAL CRITIQUE, no. 32, Winter 1995-96, pp. 97-123.

This article says nothing that is surprising, i.e. that you have not
already figured out.   But given that academia thrives on footnote-whoring
-- its substitute for conceptual analysis -- you might wish to have this
item in your bibliography.  The author does give some food for thought and
should not be blamed for the obviousness of his social analysis.  The
author recapitulates the politics of culture embedded in black music,
mentioning the spirituals and Ellington's compositions as examples, and
focusing on the creation of bebop as a way of fighting co-optation and the
funk of the hard bop era as a form of cultural assertiveness.  The author,
however, concentrates the bulk of his article on an analysis of Charles
Mingus and of Ornette Coleman, particularly the nature of musical
conversations -- the role of individuals in relation to each other and to
the coherence of the group.  Hersch relates these innovations to the
burgeoning civil rights movement, to early hopes and later letdowns.  The
author also suggests that Coltrane's ASCENSION and later the screaming in
"Evolution" reflects a feeling of the inadequacy of musical form to express
the demand for change.  There is a suggestion of possible extra-musical
causes for the ultimate wane of the free jazz movement.

Among the references, I note:  Backus, Rob.  FIRE MUSIC: A POLITICAL
HISTORY OF JAZZ.  Chicago: Vanguard, 1976.


(2)  Harding, James M.  "Adorno, Ellison, and the Critique of Jazz",
CULTURAL CRITIQUE, no. 31, Fall 1995, pp. 129-158.

You are groaning already, but hold your horses.  There is a big literature
on Adorno on jazz, most of which I haven't read, but this is the best
article I've read on the subject, and a very good one.  You may not care
much about Adorno proper, but the Ellison component will interest you.
Without whitewashing Adorno's ignorance and bias, Harding gets into the
_motivations_ behind Adorno's obsessions, which are seen as neither racist
nor emblematic of European high culture snobbery.  Adorno carries over
certain sensitivities from his experience of the demise of the Weimar
Republic, particularly its own ideological degradation of music (e.g.
Wagner), the mythology of the "folk" and the tendency of the culture
industry to commodify a degrading form of naturalness, spontaneity, and
clowning, seen as "free", as a way of exploiting the victim.  Harding
pinpoints with extreme precision the limitations of Adorno's method of
analysis while exonerating him from the grosser charges often levelled
against him.

The comparison with Ellison is especially fascinating.  There is a
fascinating analysis of the Communist Party's flirtation and competition
with the nationalist Garveyites and its manipulative and patronizing
political uses of jazz and how all that is critiqued in Ellison's novel.
While Ellison is seen to valorize the vernacular impulse embodied in jazz,
far beyond what Adorno is willing to grant, Ellison too questions the
appropriation by the culture industry and the compromised pretensions of
the liberating characteristics of the music.  Hence Ellison's own
ambivalence both toward Louis Armstrong and the "revolutionary" Charlie
Parker.

My summary is very crude, but take it from me that the article is really
good, and the bibliography is very useful.